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What Work is “The Middle East” Doing Here?

Provocations from the January 20 Campus Walk

You walked the campus. You found the Middle East – in department names, on bulletin boards, in conversations, in the library classification system, in course catalogues.

Good. Now let’s think about what you actually found.


Provocation 1: What Work is “The Middle East” Doing as a Category?

You identified something as “Middle Eastern” on campus. A department. An institute. A poster. A person. A language. A book classification.

But what is that category organizing?

Think carefully about this. When an institution creates a department called “Institute for Middle Eastern Studies” or shelves books under “Middle East – Politics,” it’s not just describing reality. It’s organizing reality.

So what’s being organized?

Is it organizing knowledge? (This is what we know about this region)

Is it organizing people? (These are the people who study/come from this region)

Is it organizing funding? (This is where research money for this region goes)

Is it organizing expertise? (These are the people authorized to speak about this region)

Is it organizing danger? (This is the region we need to understand for security purposes)

Is it organizing otherness? (This is what’s different from us)

Here’s the uncomfortable part: All of these are happening simultaneously. The category does multiple kinds of work, often contradictory work.

Questions to sit with:

  • When you saw “Middle East” on a department sign, what did that sign authorize? Who gets to speak? Who gets listened to? Who gets funding? Who gets jobs?
  • When you saw books classified under “Middle East,” what was being produced? Regional knowledge? Strategic intelligence? Academic careers? Or the region itself as an object that can be known?
  • When you identified a student as “Middle Eastern,” what were you organizing? Their identity? Your attention? The diversity statistics of the university? Their foreignness?

What if the category “Middle East” at this university exists primarily to manage – to contain, to study, to make legible, to control – rather than to understand?

What if “Middle Eastern Studies” is less about taking the region seriously and more about producing the kind of knowledge that makes the region knowable to Western institutions?

How would you tell the difference?


Provocation 2: Who Decided What Counts as “Middle Eastern”?

You found Arabic script. You heard languages. You saw posters for events. You identified people. You located institutes.

But who created the boundary that says “this is Middle Eastern” and “this is not”?

Let’s get specific:

On language:

  • You heard someone speaking Arabic in the cafeteria. Did they identify themselves as “Middle Eastern” or did you assign that category to them?
  • If you heard someone speaking German with an accent, did you classify that as “Middle Eastern presence”? Why or why not?
  • What about Turkish? Is Turkey in “the Middle East” or not? Who decided?

On geography:

  • The library has a “Middle East” section. Does it include North Africa? Turkey? Afghanistan? Iran? Central Asia? Who decided where the boundaries are?
  • Are there books about Egypt in both “Middle East” and “Africa” sections? What does that reveal about how regions get constructed?

On identity:

  • You saw someone you identified as Middle Eastern. What visual markers did you use? Skin color? Clothing? Language? How do you know you were right?
  • What if that person identifies primarily as German? As Berliner? As a student at FU? What makes “Middle Eastern” the salient category for you?

On knowledge:

  • The university has institutes that study “the Middle East.” Do those institutes include scholars who are from the region? Or is “the Middle East” something that gets studied about rather than studied from?
  • Whose knowledge counts as knowledge about the Middle East? Academic knowledge? Embodied knowledge? Lived experience?

Even more:

  • Is “the Middle East” a category that people from the region use to describe themselves? Or is it a category imposed from outside?
  • When you use “Middle Eastern” as a descriptor, are you recognizing someone’s identity or are you creating their identity as foreign, as other, as from-elsewhere?
  • What if the people you’re identifying as “Middle Eastern” don’t use that category for themselves at all? What if they’re Moroccan, Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian – and lumping them all together as “Middle Eastern” erases the specificity of their actual locations, histories, languages?
  • What happens when a category designed by colonial powers (yes, “Middle East” is a British imperial invention) becomes the organizing principle for how a German university structures knowledge?

Who benefits from “the Middle East” existing as a coherent category?

Is it the people from those regions – or is it the institutions that fund research, departments, area studies programs, security studies, strategic intelligence?


Provocation 3: What’s the Difference Between Studying and Containing?

FU has multiple institutes, departments, and programs focused on the Middle East. That’s significant institutional resources. That could mean:

Possibility 1: This university takes the region seriously as a site of knowledge production, history, culture, and thought worthy of sustained scholarly attention.

Possibility 2: This university needs to understand the region for strategic, political, or security purposes – to manage it, to predict it, to contain potential threats.

How do you tell the difference?

Look at what you found today:

Funding sources:

  • Where does the money come from for Middle Eastern studies at FU?
  • Are there connections to foreign policy institutes? Security studies? Government funding tied to “understanding the region”?
  • Or is it primarily humanities-based, focused on languages, literatures, histories for their own sake?

What gets studied:

  • When you looked at course offerings, what kinds of courses exist?
  • Are they primarily about conflict, terrorism, political instability, migration “problems”?
  • Or are they about poetry, philosophy, art, everyday life, intellectual history?
  • What does the balance reveal about what the university thinks is important to know about the region?

Who studies what:

  • Are Middle Eastern languages taught primarily to students interested in the region’s culture and history?
  • Or are they taught to students in political science, security studies, international relations who need to “understand the region” for policy purposes?
  • Who’s in those classrooms? What are they planning to do with that knowledge?

Where it’s located:

  • Are Middle Eastern studies programs integrated into the main campus or isolated?
  • Are they well-funded or scraping by?
  • Do they have institutional prestige or are they marginalized?

Even more:

  • Can you study a region without participating in its domination?
  • Is all knowledge production about the Middle East implicated in geopolitical power, or can scholarship be genuinely separate from policy interests?
  • When FU trains students in Arabic, Persian, Turkish – are they training cultural mediators or are they training future diplomats, intelligence analysts, NGO workers who will “manage” the region?

Edward Said wrote about Orientalism – the way Western scholarship created “the Orient” as an object of knowledge that could be studied, known, managed, controlled. The “Middle East” is Orientalism’s successor category.

So: Is Middle Eastern Studies at FU continuing that tradition, or breaking from it?

How would you know? What evidence did you see today? What evidence would you need to see?


Provocation 4: What If You Stopped Looking for “The Middle East” Altogether?

You’ve spent months walking Berlin looking for Middle Eastern presence. You’ve gotten good at recognizing it in a way – the signs, the languages, the shops, the restaurants, the people.

But what if that very skill – the ability to identify something as “Middle Eastern” – is a problem?

Think about what happens when you categorize:

On people:

  • You saw someone in the library and thought “that’s a Middle Eastern student.”
  • What made you think that? Their appearance? Their language? Their name?
  • But what if that person is just… a student at FU? What if they were born in Berlin, speak German as a first language, identify primarily as German?
  • By categorizing them as “Middle Eastern,” are you recognizing their identity – or are you refusing to let them be German? Are you marking them as perpetually foreign?

On spaces:

  • You identified certain campus spaces as “Middle Eastern spaces” – where Arabic is spoken, where certain student groups meet.
  • But what if those are just… campus spaces? Places where students gather, study, eat, talk?
  • By marking them as “Middle Eastern,” are you describing neutral fact – or are you othering those spaces, marking them as different from “normal” campus spaces?

On knowledge:

  • You found books classified as “Middle East – History” or “Middle East – Politics.”
  • But those books are about specific places (if you accept national or cultural borders) – Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran. Why are they all grouped under one regional category?
  • What gets lost when Egyptian history gets classified as “Middle Eastern history” instead of just “history”?
  • Why is there a “Middle East” section but no “Western Europe” section? Why is one region marked and the other unmarked as universal?

The uncomfortable questions:

  • Every time you identify something as “Middle Eastern,” you’re drawing a boundary between “Middle Eastern” and “not Middle Eastern” (which usually means “German” or “European” or “Western” or just unmarked as normal).
  • What if drawing that boundary – even with good intentions, even to recognize diversity, even to celebrate presence – is what keeps “Middle Eastern” as a category of otherness?
  • What if every time you say “I saw Middle Eastern presence at FU,” you’re actually saying “I saw something that doesn’t belong to the normal category of FU”?

Could this entire course be reproducing the problem it’s trying to examine?

You’ve been trained all semester to see “the Middle East in Berlin.” You’ve gotten very good at it. You can identify Middle Eastern restaurants, Middle Eastern neighborhoods, Middle Eastern cultural practices.

But what if that entire project – looking for the Middle East as if it’s a distinct, identifiable thing – is exactly what keeps people, languages, practices marked as foreign, as other, as not-quite-German?

What if the moment you stop looking for “Middle Eastern presence” and just start seeing people living in Berlin, students studying at FU, languages spoken in the city, shops selling things – that’s the moment the category loses its power?

But then what happens to your research? What happens to this course? What happens to Middle Eastern Studies as a field?

If the category is the problem, what’s the alternative?


Provocation 5: So What Now?

These provocations are deliberately uncomfortable. They’re designed to make you question the entire premise of what you’ve been doing.

But discomfort without direction is just paralysis. So: what now?

Some possibilities to consider:

Option 1: Reject the category entirely Stop using “Middle East” as a descriptor. Talk about specific places, specific languages, specific histories. Don’t lump Morocco and Iran together just because Western institutions decided they belong to the same region.

But: Does this erase the real connections, histories, and solidarities that exist across those regions? Does it ignore how people from those regions do sometimes organize collectively in diaspora?

Option 2: Use the category strategically Recognize that “Middle East” is a constructed, problematic category – but also recognize that it has material effects. Departments exist. Funding exists. Communities organize around it.

Maybe the point isn’t to reject the category but to be conscious of what work it’s doing and when it’s useful vs. when it’s harmful.

But: Can you use an oppressive category strategically without reinforcing it? Or does every use of the category, even critical use, make it stronger?

Option 3: Complicate the category constantly Every time you use “Middle Eastern,” immediately problematize it. Ask: whose Middle East? which parts? defined by whom? for what purposes?

Make the category unstable. Refuse to let it settle into common sense.

But: Does constant problematization become its own kind of academic performance? Does it actually change anything or just make you feel better about using a bad category?

Option 4: Focus on power, not categories Stop asking “what is Middle Eastern” and start asking “who has power to define, to include, to exclude, to represent?”

Make the analysis about institutional power, not about whether categories are accurate.

But: Can you analyze power without using any categories at all? Don’t you need some language to describe who’s being marginalized and who’s doing the marginalizing?


There are no clean answers here.

Every option has problems. Every position is compromised.

That’s the point.

The question isn’t “what’s the right answer” but “what are you going to do with the discomfort?”

Are you going to:

  • Keep using the category unconsciously?
  • Refuse the category entirely?
  • Use it strategically while acknowledging its problems?
  • Spend all your time problematizing it?
  • Find a different framework altogether?

TASK: What you do next week:

Take one observation from today’s campus walk.

Write it two ways:

Version 1: Using the category “Middle East” / “Middle Eastern” / “Arab” / regional or ethnic labels

Version 2: Without using any of those categories – describe what you saw using only specific, concrete details

Bring both versions to the next session on Feb 10. We’ll see what changes.

We’ll see what becomes visible when you remove the category.

We’ll see what gets lost.

We’ll see what the category was actually doing.

And then we’ll decide what to do with that knowledge.

What Counts as Intelligence? Notes from Our First Session

We began today (Oct 28) with a seemingly simple question:

What is intelligence?

The answers came quickly: the ability to think, to reflect, to learn. Processing and retaining information. Pattern recognition. Learning from empirical evidence. Problem-solving. Memory. Agency. Self-awareness. Emotional intelligence. Even artificial intelligence came up—that strange mirror we hold up to ourselves, trying to figure out what makes us “us.”

Someone said “mind.” Someone else said “desire versus self-awareness,” which sparked the thought of whether you need to be conscious of your desires to be intelligent, or whether desire itself is a form of intelligence.

What struck me was how much of what we named assumes a human model. A brain. A nervous system. Individual consciousness. Language. The ability to measure and be measured (someone mentioned IQ, and we paused on that—intelligence as something quantifiable, testable, rankable).

But then the conversation shifted when I asked: What if intelligence doesn’t look like this at all?

The Hierarchies We Don’t See

In small groups, I asked students to think about forms of knowledge (or intelligence or experience) that get dismissed because they don’t fit Western frameworks. The examples that emerged were striking:

Oral traditions preserve and transmit knowledge across generations through storytelling and embodied practice—but they get labeled “folklore” instead of “knowledge systems.” Writing, apparently, makes knowledge more legitimate. The medium determines the status.

Experiential knowledge—the kind built over generations through practice and observation—gets dismissed when researchers arrive demanding “data” and “studies.” “We’ve done this for generations and it works” doesn’t count the same way as knowledge produced through specific scientific protocols, even when it’s equally accurate.

I raised the question of household care work as intelligence—the complex, adaptive, multi-tasking labor that gets devalued because it’s associated with women and the domestic sphere. Someone talked about regional intelligence—how certain ways of knowing get marked as provincial, unsophisticated, tied to place rather than universal.

I called into thought thinking about children, too. About how their ways of knowing and learning get dismissed as “not yet fully developed” rather than recognized as legitimately different.

The pattern became clear: there’s a hierarchy. At the top maybe: Western, written, scientific, rational, individual, male, urban, measurable. Everything else gets pushed to the margins—mystical, traditional, folkloric, emotional, collective, feminine, regional, immeasurable.

Plants at the Bottom of the Hierarchy

If oral traditions get dismissed because they’re not written, plants are even further down the hierarchy—they don’t have language at all. Or have they? They communicate through chemicals, through slow growth patterns, through means we can barely perceive because they operate on timescales that aren’t human.

For decades, botanists who talked about plant “behavior” or plant “intelligence” risked their careers. It wasn’t considered real science. It sounded mystical, unserious, like you were anthropomorphizing—projecting human qualities onto non-human beings.

This is whatt Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters is going to confront us with: What if the problem isn’t that scientists were anthropomorphizing plants? What if the problem is that our frameworks for understanding intelligence were too narrow to hold what plants—and other forms of life—actually are?

Pea seedlings can hear water flowing underground and grow toward it. Tomato plants being eaten by caterpillars can fill their leaves with chemicals so bitter the caterpillars start eating each other instead. Plants remember. They make decisions. They communicate with each other through vast underground networks.

These aren’t metaphors. This is what plants do.

And scientists are now stuck. They can’t use their normal language—”the plant decides,” “the plant communicates”—because that sounds anthropomorphic. But passive language—”the plant is affected by,” “a chemical process occurs”—doesn’t capture what’s actually happening either.

They need new language. New concepts. New frameworks.

Which means admitting their old frameworks were limited all along.

The Translation Move

It happens all the time: a researcher encounters a concept from another tradition and says, “Oh, what you call X is really just what we call Y in psychology/biology/philosophy.” As if the (often) “Western” or “civilized” or “educated” term is the truth and the other term is just a confused or poetic version of it.

It’s a power move. It assumes one framework is universal and all others are local. It assumes one way of knowing is objective and all others are cultural. It assumes that if we can translate something into “Western” terms, we’ve understood it—when really, we might have just flattened it into something our frameworks can hold.

This is exactly what’s been happening with plants. For centuries, we’ve insisted they must fit into our categories: alive but not conscious, responsive but not intelligent, reactive but not agentic.

And now those categories are breaking.

What Else Have We Been Wrong About?

This is why I think The Light Eaters matters beyond botany. It’s a case study in what happens when your frameworks can’t hold what you’re encountering.

If we’ve been wrong about plant intelligence—not because plants weren’t intelligent, but because our definition of intelligence was too narrow—what else have we been wrong about?

What other forms of intelligence have we dismissed? What other ways of knowing have we marginalized? Whose voices have we failed to hear because we don’t have the language to listen?

The question isn’t just about plants. It’s about the hierarchies we construct and defend, often without realizing it. It’s about who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, agency.

It’s about power masquerading as objectivity.

A Provocation for the Weeks Ahead

As you read The Light Eaters over the next six weeks, I want you to sit with this discomfort:

What if everything you think you know about intelligence is based on a framework that was designed to exclude certain forms of knowing?

Not to discard your knowledge—but to recognize its limits. To see how your frameworks shape what you can and cannot see.

Pay attention to the moments when the book makes you defensive. When you want to say “but that’s not really intelligence” or “but that’s just a chemical process” or “but they don’t have consciousness like we do.”

Those moments of resistance? That’s where the thinking starts.

And here’s the second provocation, the one that connects to everything we discussed today:

How might recognizing plant intelligence change how you think about other forms of knowledge that get dismissed as “not really” intelligent, scientific, or authoritative?

If we can recognize that plants have been intelligent all along and we just couldn’t see it, what else have we failed to see? What other hierarchies might need to collapse?

Until November

We won’t meet again until November 25th. Six weeks to live with this book. Six weeks to let it unsettle you.

Don’t rush it. Don’t try to “master” it or take notes for a test. Just read it like you’d read something that might genuinely change how you see the world.


Next session: November 25, 10am-2pm Question: “What in this book made you most uncomfortable? What assumption about intelligence, communication, or agency did it disturb?”